Bulletins and News Discussion from April 21st to April 27th, 2025 - JD Vance vs Pope Francis, No Items, Final Destination

Yesterday was Carnation Day in Portugal. I'm gonna pull a mainstream media and instead of talking about the thousands of people who marched down Liberty Avenue to celebrate, I'm going to focus only on a far-right protest that happened the same day and got pretty dramatic.

So a bunch of far-right groupings, including a small but old far-right party called "Ergue-te" (which means "Rise up") scheduled a protest that would happen at the Martim Moniz plaza where they would march there and roast a pig, literally. Now, a lot of immigrants hang out and live there including from muslim countries so obviously this is supposed to be a provocation but, just to explain how dumb this is, if someone here is ever in Lisbon check out the plaza, it's pretty much just a tourist spot, mostly because it's outside a metro station and there are a lot foreign food restaurants around it, but aside from some subcontinent dudes hanging out in the garden just chilling, it's really not that different from most of Lisbon and honestly it's a place I always recommend to people who visit. So the whole thing is the far-right playing up xenophobic sentiments around people specifically from that region of the world, a lot of which do immigrate to Portugal for seasonal and other low-wage work.

So, because they asked for permission to protest the police had to evaluate whether they could do so safely so that the mayor's office could approve it. At first, the police gave the ok, then when obviously they realized there would be a bunch of counter protests they backed out and gave the "Not ok", so the Mayor unauthorized the protest. Now if this had been the far-right Chega party organizing this protest, that would be the end of it, they'd stick to yelling about how the government doesn't even let you publicly roast a pig, they're pretty politically astute unfortunately.

But these guys are extra crazy so they decided to hold the protest anyway, and in a rare sight, after pretty clearly provoking both the counter-protestors AND the police who were there to keep the counter-protestors from caving their heads in, well...

(CW: Police violence) Some got smacked, some got detained and some got arrested.

(CW: Hog violence) To show how blatant this thing was, here's a clip of one of these guys caught on camera, pretty clearly infiltrating the counter-protest to start a fight and rile everybody up.